Losing patience
It really pains me to say this but I’m losing patience with the phpBB group. I respect that all their work; development, website and support is done in their own time, but it strikes me that recently they have got their priorities all wrong.
One day I wake up to find they’ve had a hard drive crash and they need to take some time to restore the site. Fair dos. When the site finally comes back they have this amazing new design and they have started using version 3 (very nice it is too), but half the site was broken (mods and styles mainly) and there was no version 3 release for the users! So they get to state that we can’t use v3 supported in a live environment but use it on their own site with over 1000 concurrent users, furthermore they stop us from getting the most out of v2 by breaking the system for submitting and downloading mods and styles.
Don’t get me wrong, I love phpBB and work with it regularly, but this attitude is taking the piss. If you have time to develop a new site, surely you have time to finish v3? I flatly refuse to create another site using v2 because it would need too many mods and style alterations that an “upgrade” to v3 would be impossible. I’ve got several sites that I need to create for business that need forums and I’ve been delaying them in order to use phpBB v3.0 RC1 but it really does look like its never coming.
Well, despite the fact it probably won’t be read, I have a message for phpBB group; If you dont release what is clearly RC1 worthy in the next couple of weeks to your users, I’m going to move EVERYTHING to vBulletin. Your software is miles better in my humble opinion, but if we can’t use it on our sites without you bitching at us saying its not ready when you are using it on your own site, then I’m going to have to pick the next best solution in the chain, and that’s vBulletin. I’ve been very patient, but I just don’t have the time to wait anymore and I can’t be creating extra work for myself by using v2 with mods just to get v3 functionality and then because of that not be able to upgrade to v3 (or making it very difficult to upgrade to v3).
Get your act together phpBB; I and I’m sure many others are tired of waiting for software to be finished that is obviously already finished.
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Paul Said,
April 16, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
I couldn’t agree more…..
OK I only have 2 forums on the go, both phpbb and thankfully I did not use any mods for the exact reason you state. Both being fairly new and light useage gave me that opportunity not to mod them extensively and they serve their purpose but if it is ready (which it must be) then release the damn thing and let us get on with trying to work with it.
The added bonus of course is it doesn’t cost anything whereas vBulletin does so maybe that would be an argument but is it a valid one, I don’t think so and like you, many others may say for the nominal amount that they charge for either leased or owned, it may well be worth shelling out $85.00 (hmmm it’s not a nominal amount really is it!!! $160.00 for owned) but I think you will see where I’m coming from.